Iran

Iran’s worrisome prominence in world events can’t help but cross your mind while viewing “Ardeshir Mohassess; Art and Satire in Iran,” an exhibition on view at the Asia Society. And not only because Mr. Mohassess hails from Iran. His brand of satire is, to put it mildly, skeptical of his home country’s political convolutions. Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffer Mr. Mohassess’ uncompromising art gladly?  read more »

Beneath the bluster—Iranian patrol boats reportedly playing chicken with U.S. warships; President Bush’s statements about “containing” Iran—there’s a significant shift under way in the relationship between Iran and the United States. And nearly everyone is missing it.  read more »

In response to this week's news that, according to the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program four years ago, CNN has tabled its forthcoming documentary We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear.

Variety reports: "The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the 'CNN Presents' banner, was 'set partially in the future,' featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials -- playing fictional cabinet members -- debate how to deal with the Iranian threat."  read more »

More from Hillary Clinton on Iraq and Iran:

She writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine that she lays out a tough diplomatic approach on Iran and says that she would start bringing troops home from Iraq "within the first 60 days of [her] administration," but that she could also foresee an American presence in and around the country to help maintain stability and keep pressure on al Qaeda.

In a conference call with reporters that just ended, her campaign's national security director, Lee Feinstein, said that while "a commander and chief does not take options off the table and neither does Senator Clinton," she also "makes it very very clear that the best approach, the preferred approach right now, is to pursue...diplomacy and economic pressure."

Feinstein was asked about whether a bill supported by Clinton asking the Bush administration to declare Iran's 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization paved the way to open conflict with Iran.

"No," said Feinstein. "There is nothing whatsoever which gives any authorization of the kind."

He said that the Guards "are indisputably an odious outfit," and that "some people want to rush to war. Some people think that doing nothing is the answer." But the bill, he said, was part of a robust diplomatic effort to put pressure on Iran.  read more »

It can often to seem to rank-and-file Democrats as if the Republicans are still in charge of Congress: Nearly a year after their party picked up 31 House and six Senate seats, the war in Iraq still rages, with tens of thousands of more troops deployed now than then. This failure to force even a beginning to the end of the war accounts for the painfully poor poll standing of the Democratic-led Congress, with the party faithful even more restless and frustrated than independent voters.  read more »

Observer contributor Niall Stanage, who is currently on assignment in Iran, sends an email for our "general amusement" to say that it is possible where he is to access the sites of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian and the Times of London, but that attempts to get to the New York Post, the Sun, Gawker or Wonkette are met with "a disappointingly literal 'Access to this Site is Denied' together with some Farsi script presumably saying the same thing."

 

 

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A nationwide Quinnipiac poll gauged the popularity of various countries with American voters and found that North Korea became slightly more popular, Iran became less popular and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela stayed the same. Here are the current approval ratings of the most popular and least popular countries, along with their scores from a Quinnipiac survey back in November.

1) England - 77.9 (78.9)

2) Canada - 75.4 (73.4)

3) Israel - 66.5 (68.2)

[skip]

12) Venezuela - 30.3 (30.9)

13) Iraq - 27.1 (25.9)

14) Palestinian Government - 24.3 (23.8)

15) Syria - 23.8 (24.3)

16) Cuba - 21.8 (24.1)

17) North Korea - 15.7 (13.5)

18) Iran - 13.5 (15.5)  read more »

The full list is after the jump.

-- Azi Paybarah

Hans Blix believes the Bush administration is courting catastrophe in its handling of Iran.  read more »

Regardless of which side of whatever issue she may take, Senator Hillary Clinton still has a slimy-p  read more »

Whatever George W.  read more »

Doni Remba, a peace activist, disputes my claim that the progressive voice in Jewish life has been marginalized by the neocons. He has some evidence: he says he's getting traction in the Jewish press for his view that there has to be a progressive lobby, to push for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. His post follows, below.

I have one important quibble, ahead of time. Remba reflects the conventional leftish pro-Israel view that the dog wags the tail. I.e., that Israel is a client that does as the imperial U.S. wants it to do. The U.S. doesn't want Israel to talk to Syria; so it doesn't. His view of the Israel lobby is that it is merely seconding rightwing choices that the U.S. government is making. And so he says:

American choices heavily constrain the Jewish state, eliminating options and creating the environment in which Israel must make its own now far more limited and difficult choices.

That's where I demur. I believe that Israel has made its own choice not to speak to Syria, for years, and that its friends in Congress reinforce that line here. I feel like a lot of lefty Jews want to think the dog wags the tail: the Stephen Zunes line, that neocon Zionist Jews have had only minor influence over a rightwing administration. Or here is Shlomo Ben-Ami, in the latest Commentary, making the same point (I'm afraid it's not online yet, but I just got my issue in the mail):

"[T]he interplay of factors that truly make up American foreign policy [are] strategic considerations, imperial ambitions, oil, the arms industry, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, ideology, and, last but not by no means least, the political and intellectual profile of the president. Bush's moral certitude and self-imposed divine mission makes [sic] utterly redundant the need for an 'Israel Lobby' to teach him the political gospel it wants him to follow in the Middle East."

I think Ben Ami is wrong, that he is blinding himself to a multitude of sins under that little word "ideology," that George Bush had little idea of anything when he came into office. I.e., that neocons are smart guys with a highly-developed belief system; and they also had agency here (yes, along with a lot of other fools who pushed this war).

In fairness, Remba does go after Jewish "communal leaders" choices. A nice way of putting the fact that neocon beliefs about the Arab world have gained wide currency in the erstwhile liberal Jewish leadership. But read Remba's post (which he was not able to post; problems again, sorry folks):

You write: "I do question the political will of the body of American Jewry; if they feel misrepresented by the Israel lobby and their congressmen, they ought to rise up against them. George Soros says he's going to start an anti-occupation lobby. Good for him, I'm in his camp. Will he get numbers?"

I'd like to offer two of my recent articles on this subject for your and your readers' consideration. The first, published in the English edition of Ha'aretz, "Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby," can be read in Ha'aretz or on my blog at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2006/11/haaretz-wanted-moderate-pr... The new dovish pro-Israel peace lobby is not a Soros initiative, but an cooperative effort of many liberal/progressive Jews from various Jewish organizations, think tanks, liberal Democratic political activists and funders.  read more »

How many supporters will we get? Watch and wait. Many of us are working on it.

Should the United States attack Iran, which side would the Iraqi government support?  read more »

In the 15 years during which I more or less regularly conducted a column for this newspaper, I can&r  read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

In Tuesday's New York Sun, editor Seth Lipsky refers to the Six-Day war of 1967 in typical fashion, saying that Ariel Sharon "saved the Jewish state" by enveloping the Egyptians in the Sinai. Lipsky's view of the war is unreconstructed chauvinism; it shows no familiarity with Israel's new historians, who have described the '67 war as a terrible accident brought on by saber-rattling militarists on both sides. Neither side really wanted war. The Israelis were more powerful than the Arab forces, and though Israel justly feared for its existence in the face of Arab rhetoric, Israel over-reacted to threats out of a "psychosis of annihilation," writes former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

"Yitzhak Rabin intentionally led Israel into a war with Syria... Egypt was definitely not ready for war and Nasser did not want a war... In Israel the road to war was paved by a genuine existential fear, a legacy of the Ben-Gurion years, which always led to perceiving crises in apocalyptic terms and reacting only according to worst-case scenarios." (From Ben-Ami's book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace.)

The result of this war was a disaster: the Occupied Territories, which have destroyed Israel's idealism.

That brings me to the bomb. If you read the history of this disastrous war, a natural question is whether Nasser massed his forces on the Sinai border, thereby provoking the Israelis, because he feared Israel's nuclear ambitions. Why, just three years before, Nasser had told the U.S. that Israel's developing the bomb "would be a cause for war, no matter how suicidal."  read more »

I don’t know how the poet Horace managed to get an advance copy of the report of the Iraq Study Gr  read more »

I don’t know how the poet Horace managed to get an advance copy of the report of the Iraq Stud  read more »

As someone who has never displayed any great aptitude with words, President George W.  read more »

As someone who has never displayed any great aptitude with words, President George W.  read more »

With the Senate and House under Democratic control, and the defense department in new hands, some members of Congress are apparently now comfortable enough to tell their scariest Donald Rumsfeld stories.

Here's one from Jerry Nadler:

"During the one month official war with Iraq, you know, before Mission Accomplished, when the tanks were rolling across the dessert, we had a secret briefing with Rumsfeld. And I went to him at the end of the briefing and I said to him privately, 'Mr. Secretary, what is our policy to keep Iran from getting atomic weapons?' And he looked at me, because I was not concerned about Iraq, he looked at me and he said, 'The Iranian regime is very unpopular, there is lot of opposition internally, it may be unstable. We hope the regime will be overthrown before they get nuclear weapons.' I said 'Well I hope so too, but what is our policy?' And he turned and walked away."

--Jason Horowitz

The other side holds no elections.  read more »

The midterm election was decisive—the election of 1874, that is.  read more »

The midterm election was decisive—the election of 1874, that is.  read more »

Left-wing New York gathered at the Society for Ethical Culture at 64th Street and Central Park West  read more »

If North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test was indeed a dud, we will hear another round of jo  read more »

If North Korea’s first nuclear weapons test was indeed a dud, we will hear another round of jokes  read more »

On Tuesday, Sept.  read more »

An important piece in the Forward this week suggests that Bush is at last going to do something about Israel/Palestine so as to try and redeem his failed policies in the Middle East and restore American legitimacy in the world. The Forward quotes Philip Zelikow, an assistant to Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the pro-Israel thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Zelikow said that the Europeans and the moderate Arabs are America's most important allies in confronting Iran and Islamist terrorism, "and some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is the sine qua non for them to cooperate actively with the United States on lots of other things that we care about.

"We can rail against that belief; we can find it completely justifiable. It is a fact. That means an active policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute is an essential ingredient to forging a coalition that deals with the most dangerous problem."

Sine qua non. Nice. The daybreak moment is reflected by MJ Rosenberg on the IPF Forum:

This is something new: the realization by Washington that movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not only right, it is essential if the United States is to achieve progress anywhere in the region.

Under Secy' of State Karen Hughes said the same thing earlier this week (on CNN or MSNBC) before Bush's appearance at the U.N. "Everywhere I go," she said, people talk about Israel/Palestine; we're going to get moving on that one.

One can only hope. Naturally, the Forward's Ori Nir reports that the Israelis are disturbed by the pressure. It means doing something about the hated occupation. But it's worth considering that the uptick in Arab prestige achieved by the Lebanon war may actually further the possibility of a deal.

"[A] central feature of the Arab Israeli conflict [is that] Israel's military victories and the Arabs' humiliating defeat could never be the prelude to peace," Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Foreign Minister, has written. The '67 war, for instance, bolstered Israel's tendency toward unilateralism and suspicion of Arab motives. "It took the recovery of Arab pride and a serious setback for Israel in 1973, as well as the national trauma and collective soul-searching that followed, to make the Israelis and their leaders ripe for compromise."

Maybe that's happening now, maybe Bush, punctured by his Iraqi nightmare, is actually doing some soul-searching. Someone lend him a penlight.

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s widely covered and high-profile 12-day trip to the  read more »

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s widely covered and high-profile 12-day trip to the U.S  read more »

On Friday, the Nation magazine hosted Yizhar Be'er, who directs a media monitoring organization in Israel called Keshev. (The group's president is David Grossman, the writer, who lost his son, a tank commander, in Lebanon last month.)

The theme of Be'er's comments was the danger of unilateralism—the policy of going it alone in the Middle East, undertaken by both the U.S. and Israel. Be'er spoke of a false attitude in Israel toward its neighbors that is scarily reminiscent of American attitudes: "we are under continuing threat and the other side only understands the language of power." The Israeli media had helped create that attitude by "strengthening the feeling of threats and paranoia through a process of demonization and delegitimation of the other side."  read more »

TEL AVIV—In the upcoming weeks, myriad Israeli committees and panels will begin deconstructing  read more »

TEL AVIV—In the upcoming weeks, myriad Israeli committees and panels will begin deconstructing the  read more »

Candidates in Brooklyn's 10th Congressional District debate at NY1 (7 & 10:30).

Maryland Democratic candidates, Benjamin Cardin and Kwiesi Mfume (head of the NAACP) debate on C-SPAN 2 at 7.

Andrew Cuomo and Charlie King speak at the House of the Lord Church (415 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn) at 8 p.m.

Mike Bloomberg finds out if his favorite Shakira video wins an MTV Music Video award when the award show starts at at Radio City Music Hall at 8 p.m.

And at 10 p.m., C-SPAN has a rerun of Iran response "to the United Nations Security Council deadline on Iran's nuclear program."

-- Azi Paybarah

About a month ago, I was having dinner in a West Village bistro, eavesdropping on two young men who  read more »

The war in Lebanon and Israel doesn’t have much to do with Lebanon, and scarcely more to do with I  read more »

The war in Lebanon and Israel doesn’t have much to do with Lebanon, and scarcely more to do wi  read more »

An article in this week's Observer about the unanimity among New York politicians in supporting Israel's bombing of Lebanon (surprise) contains an important statement by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (who was a brave opponent of the Iraq war):

[Nadler] equated support for Israel at this moment with support for the country's right to exist at all..."This reminds me very much of the first week of June 1967, and I'm very worried about it. That was the week before the Six Day War broke out.."

Is that a realistic attitude? No. Look how much has changed since '67. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace agreements with Israel. Israel's existence may have been at risk through the '73 war (we can argue about that), but who can say that now? It is a regional hegemon. Syria and Israel have been very close to peace; and Syria is so poor Israel could walk into Damascus tomorrow. Saudi Arabia has said approving things of Israel's attacks on Lebanon. Though yes Israel has an enemy in Iran, Iran—which by the way, used to be on the U.S. side in the war on terror, right up thru Afghanistan—is being faced down by the world. This latest fighting would seem to truly endanger the existence of Lebanon, not Israel.

Nadler's emotional statements underscore what Henry Siegman told the Washington Post Magazine the other day:

"There's a certain dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group," says Henry Siegman, who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now directs the U.S./Middle East project at the Council of Foreign Relations. "It creates a culture of victimhood, and it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."

As Michael Desch's article on the "myth of abandonment" fostered by the Holocaust suggests, citing "existential" fears for Israel is an unconscious way of invoking the Holocaust to justify anything Israel does. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had no nuclear weapons.

This is about the power of ideas. The neocons were on the outs for a long time after Reagan left office. To their credit, they lived quietly in their cells exchanging crazily logical ideas about the Middle East—and were well paid to do so. They won over a lot of Democrats. Then through a concatenation of events, Cheney, 9/11, they were suddenly sitting in the Oval Office.

That's over, of course. The proof of which is all the noise they are making in the neoconservative press, from the Sun to the Weekly Standard, about taking on Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, the left is on the outs, but all the talk about the Israel lobby is of course fueling the left's response to the neocons, and to Democratic hawks. On Sunday the Washington Post magazine published its brave cover on the Israel lobby and author Glenn Frankel included a fabulous psychological insight from Henry Siegman:

While American Jews may have become powerful, they don't feel powerful. A new set of pogroms or a new Holocaust? It could happen, even in America. "There's a certain dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group," says Henry Siegman, who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now directs the U.S./Middle East project at the Council of Foreign Relations. "It creates a culture of victimhood, and it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."

Juan Williams obviously read that article before he went on Fox News Sunday, where he struck out at Bill Kristol in a way that drew on Siegman's analysis.

You just want war, war, war, and you want us in more war. You wanted us in Iraq. Now you want us in Iran. Now you want us to get into the Middle East, where I think there's a real interesting dynamic at play. I think it's psychological on the part of Israel and many of its supporters, and I'll throw you in here. Somehow you see Israel as weak, and you see Ehud Olmert as weak. And the defense minister as weak. Everybody is weak in the aftermath of Sharon, and so everybody has to prove what a man they are in the Middle East, including -- you're saying, why doesn't the United States take this hard, unforgiving line? Well, the hard and unforgiving line has been, we don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to Hamas. We don't talk to Hezbollah. We're not going to talk to Iran. Where has it gotten us, Bill?

Apparently Kristol threw up his hands and didn't answer. As if to say, Antisemitism! While Williams must have felt indemnified by Siegman's Jewishness in saying what he did.

B’esm’allah-o-rahman-o-rahim,” began the Iranian foreign minister.  read more »

B’esm’allah-o-rahman-o-rahim,” began the Iranian foreign minister.  read more »

The Iranian nuclear issue has dominated international headlines for some time now, competing with, o  read more »

The Iranian nuclear issue has dominated international headlines for some time now, competing with, o  read more »

In 2001, scientists exploring murky river bottoms in Indonesia found a new creature, the mimic octop  read more »

And while we're on the subject of Iraq...

Virginia's former governor, Mark Warner, has been on the faux-campaign trail for '08 for some time now, and talked a couple of nights ago at a DL21C event -- part of the group's 'Eye on 2008' Speaker Series -- about about what he'd like the country to be doing about Iraq and Iran.

He told a receptive audience that the new Iraqi government has a period of "six to nine months" to reach a level of stability, but also said that "this is never going to happen to a level of stability so we can exit until Iraq's neighbor's are brought to the table as well."

He didn't talk as much about what happens if the Iraqi government falls apart and if Iraq's regional neighbors want no part of cleaning up the mess.

On Iran, Warner advocated a sort of aggressive multilateralism, saying, "we absolutely must rally the world in a concerted effort to stop Iranian expansionism." And he praised the Bush administration's recent decision to negotiate with Iran.  read more »

Fuller comments, for anyone interested, after the jump.

—Nicole Brydson CLARIFICATION: As noted in the comments section, but which we may not have made clear enough in the original post, this was a DL21C event and not a Warner fundraiser.

If they weren’t real, many of Mark Bowden’s characters would seem like the creations of  read more »

If they weren’t real, many of Mark Bowden’s characters would seem like the creations of a lazy H  read more »

I wonder if other readers of the Times Op-Ed page are as aware of the mighty struggle that seems to  read more »